Culture

A U.K. crafter came under fire this weekend when parents discovered that his handmade hedgehogs had been assembled with pages from an erotic novel. As The Guardian reported, the unidentified hobbyist made his “little creations” from donated books, often to raise money for charity. An apparently friendly sort, the man also liked to hand his paper creatures out to area children. So far, so sweet. But alas, not all hedgehogs are created elegant. On closer inspection, “some parents

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents Reassembly: the Class of 2027 Thesis Exhibition, which brings the culminating work of 3rd-year MFA candidates to the Bard College main campus in Annendale-on-Hudson, NY, and the newly-acquired Massena Exhibition Center in Barrytown, NY.  Reassembly will begin with an evening of performances at Olin Hall on the Bard College campus at 7pm on Friday, July 10th. The exhibition’s opening reception at Massena

Minnesota Street Project Foundation presents the 2026 San Francisco Art Book Fair (SFABF), taking place July 23–26, marking 10 years since the inaugural fair in 2016. Highly anticipated and one of the largest, free, annual Bay Area arts events, SFABF celebrates art publishing and print culture by bringing together independent publishers, artists, designers, collectors, and enthusiasts from around the world. Since its establishment 10 years prior, SFABF continues to serve as a platfor

Happy (belated) 250th, America! We’re not exactly in the party mood this rainy Monday, but que sera. This weekend brought Washington a militaristic display, and most states a conundrum: how do we celebrate a country that is actively furthering a violent, fascist agenda, in and outside its own borders? To paraphrase Dazed and Confused‘s Ms. Stroud on the day of the bicentennial, we can’t forget what we’ve been asked to celebrate: “the fact that a bunch of slave-ownin

The spark for Hélène Bessette’s third book came while she was on holiday with her two sons on the northern coast of France. One night, they heard a gunshot in the hotel where they were staying; Bessette later read in the newspaper that a boy had shot and killed his father. She continued to follow the case, and at some point began to reconstruct her findings on the page. A reader will quickly realize, however, that Bessette is not interested in anything like a straightforward true crime story; wh

The summer sports season is officially in session! Wimbledon is heating up as the annual British tennis tournament moves from the qualifiers to the main competition, while this year’s epic FIFA World Cup, taking place across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, continues apace. Here, find Vogue’s roundup of all the starriest—and most stylish—sports parties of the season.

TODAY: In 1893, Guy de Maupassant dies. Michael Dirda makes the case for Moby-Dick as the ultimate American novel. | Lit Hub Criticism Why the “legendary” dinner party from Plato’s Symposium is actually about love. | Lit Hub Craft How medieval scribes engaged in writing as a spiritual practice (and preserved culture and history in the process). | Lit Hub History On the unexpected gift of sharing a geriatric debut: “When my manuscript wasn’t chosen as the winner, I had a sinki

Akira Ikezoe’s schematic paintings, on view in the Whitney Biennial and Greater New York, are unmistakably his. Teeming with frogs, robots, and bears caught up in flowcharts of labor and industry, their dark humor resonates deeply with our current moment. Curator Sofia Thiệu D'Amico met the artist at his studio to discuss environmental catastrophe, parenthood, his childhood in Japan, and more.More, as always, including John Yau on Charles Seliger’s intricate cellular vi

Near the beginning of his long narrative poem “Letter to Lord Byron,” W. H. Auden writes, “I want a form that’s large enough to swim in.” So too, apparently, did Herman Melville for his sixth book, when the thirty-year-old author decided to enlarge and deepen a relatively straight-forward nautical adventure story, somewhat in the vein of his first and greatest success, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), and make it…what exactly? Many readers today regard Moby-

The yodel: the perfect acknowledgment of that which cannot be hidden anymore and therefore also that which we have always had to hide. The yodel: the flickering Adam’s apple. Not unlike a sound we sometimes ever inadvertently make, a kind of croaking sound, a sound that is not so much even made as it is emitted and then immediately and often embarrassingly, very forgivably, try to cover up, with a faked cough or a clearing of the throat. But that is it: the yodel must be forgiven. And the yodel

I have been obsessed with dinner parties since I was eight or nine. At this age my greatest desire was to get my mum to let me stay up for the ones she threw for her friends. Once I even succeeded. It was amazing. and yes; it involved a hostess trolley. As an adult I have therefore made it a priority in my life to throw a lot of dinner parties. The problem with dinner parties, from the point of view of a hostess, is that so much is always going on and once and you can only be in one place at a t

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here. On July 8, 1918, just two weeks shy of his 19th birthday, American Red Cross volunteer Ernest Hemingway was struck by an Austrian mortar shell while delivering chocolate to soldiers on the Italian front. The shell landed about three feet from the teenage Hemingway, knocking him out and filling his legs with shrapnel. An Italian soldier standing between him and the blast was killed; another lost both legs in the explosion

At the 2026 Venice Biennale, artists and writers converged on Yto Barrada’s exhibition at the French Pavillion to pay tribute to Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan. A stalwart polymath working across poetry, prose, and visual art, Adnan’s practice featured themes of dispersal, indeterminacy and relation. Since her passing in November 2021, at 96 years old, the reverberation of her work’s impact has only grown. There in Venice, French fashion designer Michelle Lamy read an excerpt of Adnan

If I were 26 years old, full of piss and vinegar and had a debut poetry collection, I’d fancy myself a modern-day troubadour. I’d live out of my car, which would likely be a beat-up Volvo station wagon, with a COEXIST bumper sticker slapped across the back windshield. I’d inflict my poems on both suspecting and unsuspecting audiences, roaming from town to town, taking the stage at whatever coffee shops would have me. I’d wow the crowds that would number anywhere from two to twenty-two with my fu

Because monastic life depended on books, it was natural that monks and nuns came to produce them. Many monasteries included a scriptorium, a dedicated writing room where books were meticulously copied by hand. In Northern Europe, the scriptorium was often located next to the calefactorium (warming room), where a fire was kept alive, allowing scribes to step in and warm themselves when needed. Most of these books were for the monastery’s own use, though some monasteries produced codices for sale.

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. “The true and durable path into and through experience,” Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the young more than a century later in his magnificent commencement a

“Nashville—a shadow play of what we have become and where we might look for wisdom,” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., was published in the June 1975 issue of Vogue.

Looking for something to make your pulse race and your hair stand on end? The best true-crime documentaries and docu-series crawl with dark secrets and shocking twists, whether their subject is a missing child, a dead roommate, or a criminal cover-up.

Akira Ikezoe welcomes me into his studio wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt made by the Cevallos Brothers, with whom he was recently featured in the Greater New York survey at MoMA PS1. That is just one of several large-scale exhibitions and international biennials Ikezoe has participated in over the last few years, including the Sharjah Biennial last year and this year’s Whitney Biennial. As a result, his studio is sparse, save for a few paintings in progress.Ikezoe offers me tea as we recall

At age 19, Charles Seliger received his first solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery The Art of This Century in 1945, and was one of the youngest artists associated with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. However, unlike most painters in this nascent movement, he never worked on a large scale, nor did he become a gestural or geometric painter. Devoted to nature and Surrealist automatism, he remained a maverick. That independence explains why he is seldom included in surveys of Abst